Notification Agents: A Hidden Treasure (4 of 4)

In this blogpost, we’ll look at how to administrate your Notifications and decide who’s allowed to make notifications. The last bullet is a discussion on where Notification Agents fit in your general TARGIT Strategy:

How to control who can create Notification Agents

How to control who can manage Notification Agents

How to manage Notification Agents

Final discussion on Notification Agents and their place in your strategy

Who Can Create a Notification Agent?

TARGIT Management lets you see if a certain group of users is allowed to create and edit Notification Agents. Choose the "Rights" tab within TARGIT Management:

On the right-hand side, choose "Designers":

Now pick the last tab (Rights) and scroll down to "Create/Edit Notification Agents". This is where you decide if a certain group of users is allowed to create their own Notification Agents:

Who Can Manage Notification Agents?

The right to "Create/Edit Notification Agents" is a right to make your own agents – and also to administrate your own agents through the "Scheduled Jobs" tab in TARGIT.

On the same tab in TARGIT Management, you can assign the right to be "Scheduled Jobs administrator" to a group of users (circled in red below). This gives you the right to manage all scheduled jobs (including Notification Agents):

How to Manage Notification Agents

When you are a "Scheduled Jobs Administrator" you can edit/delete/run all jobs in the Scheduled Jobs dialogue. Click this button in the File ribbon to get there:

Now you see an overview of all the "Scheduled Jobs" in your organization (The overview is just an example).

You can search through jobs using the Search field in the top right-hand side of the dialogue.

You can sort the overview of jobs by clicking on any Caption.

You can right-click a certain Job and:

- Choose Properties to edit the job- Choose Run Now to do a test run of the job- Disable the job if it shouldn’t be active for a certain period of time- Delete a job- Look at the log and investigate the reason a certain job has failed

On the right-hand side of the overview (see the enlarged version), you can filter by:

Last Result

Filter out the jobs that have been successful or that have given a warning of "failed" or "not run yet".

TypeFilter between all the different types of Scheduled job that TARGIT Allows.

Active

See only "Enabled" or "Disabled" jobs.UsersFilter out the jobs created by a certain User.

Finally, you can set up that you want to receive emails in case a job fails. Note: You can also set this Notification on a certain job.

Where does Notification Agents belong in your TARGIT Strategy?

Maybe you remember this illustration from the first of these four blog posts examining TARGIT Notifications:

As you can see, there are quite a few options to export, distribute data by schedule and make ad-hoc exports within TARGIT.

3 reasons to use Notification Agents

What makes Notification Agents special is the fact that you can make them conditional – which means you only get a Notification when a certain condition is met. That condition allows you to pinpoint problems and potential problems that should be acted upon somewhere within the organization.

You can monitor very detailed information (down to product, employees, customers, etc.) and choose to be notified only when problems are registered. Without Notification Agents, you would need to browse through endless reports to do the same.

Using Notification Agents is your key to becoming truly data-driven, since any Notification should be followed by some kind of action.

Practical Use Cases (Summary)

In our four blog posts, we have discussed a number of use cases where Notification Agents could bring value to your organization:

1. Monitoring thresholds(Money spent, absence registered, how many on stock, have we reached budget, etc.)

All these thresholds are monitored in a certain context (with a certain filter), which lets you pay attention to details that would be extremely time-consuming to monitor without Notification Agents.

You typically have an action assigned for the person responsible for the data you are monitoring (such as call into a meeting, check what has happened or change the procedure). In other words: Your organization is automatically getting more and more data-driven as the Notifications are received and acted on.

2. Monitoring data quality (Have registrations been done as they should? Do we have unknown values? How fast do we improve our data quality? Do we have extreme values that we should be aware of?)

Data Discipline can be monitored and the people responsible for registrations getting done on time can be Notified automatically.

Data Quality checks on the number of transactions where data can’t be identified.

Extreme values could be a result of errors made during registration, but also might be a sign of fraud.

3. Governing your Notifications(Note: Within TARGIT, there is always a central administrator who can easily assess what data is shared with whom. This is also the case for Notifications). This blog post looks at the administrator role with regard to Notification Agents.

You decide whether all TARGIT designers are allowed to make their own Agents. However, even if they are, the "Scheduled Jobs Administrator" has the full overview and the power to delete, disable or edit jobs created by anyone in the organization.

This concludes our blog post series on Notification Agents in TARGIT.

Thank you for taking the time to learn more about the hidden treasure Notification Agents.

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